On large document-driven projects, newsrooms often bring together teams of collaborators that include independent researchers who aren’t formally part of the newsroom. Newsrooms that want a research team to evaluate thousands of documents — more than our collaboration tools are designed to accommodate — can take advantage of our new access level: the freelancer. A “freelancer” can upload, annotate, and edit documents like any other user, but they can only access documents you’ve explicitly shared with them.

To add a user (or ten) who is going to be contributing reporting but shouldn’t have access to the rest of your newsroom’s documents, you can create an account for a freelancer.

Freelancer accounts are good for anyone that you regularly work with, but who doesn’t actually work for your organization, or for folks you’re bringing together on a single reporting project.